TRANSFORMATION IN CAMBODIA

...Phnom Penh Radio, January 1976 In a little less than two years, i.e., since the liberation of Phnom Penh and Battambang in April 1975, the former Buddhist kingdom of Cambodia, which had weathered two thousand years of recorded history, a century of French control, six years of American bombing and perhaps five centuries (c.800-1400) of grandeur, has transformed itself into what seems to be the most radically altered country in the world...

...After years of propaganda from their leaders and pummeling from U.S...

...Surely, as a friend of mine has written, we Americans with our squalid record in Cambodia should be "cautiously optimistic" about the new regime, "or else shut up...

...At the same time, people who held authority under Lon Nol began to disappear for "study...

...What do we do, now, in contrast to all this...

...This structure, modeled on a military one, proved to be an effective instrument of Khmer Rouge control...

...Hours were long and food was scarce, although the "organization" made a point of feeding work-teams better than they fed "unproductive" people...

...in others, especially those liberated late in the war, it was violent and brief...

...A refugee from Battambang recalls a Khmer Rouge making this point at a miting in dramatic terms...

...American bombing--one of Dr...

...Cambodian" one...

...Other refugees have gone to Vietnam...

...To make up for this they are now told that they own the land and factories where they work, and even the revolution itself...

...Effect on the Peasants How did this legacy affect peasants in the colonial era...

...What had we built...

...Money is no longer used...

...Refugees, on the other hand, have by definition run away...

...For these reasons, the liberating forces there seem to have been especially vengeful and undisciplined...

...What was revolutionary about the process, in Cambodian terms, was the value placed on manual labor almost as an end in itself...

...Did country people see it...

...Those who disliked it fled, if they could, to government zones, swelling the population of Phnom Penh to some three million people...

...Where did they build it...

...The phrase is sometimes known as autarky, and Khieu Samphan used this word in his address to the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations held in Colombo last year...

...the abolition of money, badges of rank and private property...

...The big people's children...

...Words that suggest foreign influence--such as "Communist," "socialist" or "Marxist," to name only three--do not appear in the constitution...

...Nearly all the information we have comes from refugees or from officials of the regime...

...Scholars know little of what actually went on...

...These "young intellectuals," or "Khmer Rouge," as Sihanouk called them, included many men who became leaders in Democratic Kampuchea--Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, Son Sen and Ieng Sary, to name only four...

...The "old society," is seen as foreign, unequal, exploitative and corrupt...

...Foreign models were played down to make the revolution seem a Cambodian one without roots in the "old society...

...Its habits, hierarchies and economic relations have been swept aside...

...What were the effects of monetization, schooling and printed books...

...systematic puritanism affecting dress, hair-styles and sexual behavior...

...1 April 1977:210...

...The same is true of the early independence period (1953-1970), the so-caUed "Sihanouk years...

...To understand why so many Cambodians chose revolution in the 1970s, we need to know more about patterns of land ownership, malnutrition and indebtedness in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the growth of personal fortunes, and corruption, among the Phnom Penh elite...

...What are its roots, ideology, tactics and plans...

...But information on this point is ambiguous...

...Ricocheting, their song stitches the nether light of stars in a delicate fiction...

...Stories about harsh conditions and .atrocities come largely from this part of the country...

...The Prince himself occupies the foreground, obscuring such important things as Cambodia's population boom, poorly planned mass education, the "revolution of rising expectations" and the effects on daily life of the Vietnamese civil war...

...French words are no longer used in Cambodian conversation...

...The hope of reincarnation in Buddhism was to improve one's place...

...The lack of refugees from other regions could mean that conditions there are better than in the northwest, or merely that the Thai border is too far away to reach on foot...

...In isolated villages--especially after the abandonment of Cambodia's great capital, at Angkor, in the fifteenth Commonweal: 207 century---Cambodian peasant-slayes, harassed at will by people in authority, developed little sense of community or strength...

...By mid-summer, howI April 1977:208 ever, the killings stopped, and the transformation of Cambodian rural society, in the northwest, began in earnest...

...Cambodians are urged daily by their radio, and four times in the constitution, to "build and defend" their country against unspecified enemies...

...Well, they built an independence monument...

...TRANSFORMATION IN CAMBODIA DAVID P. CHANDLER The most radiccdly altered :ountry in the world "'Two thousand years of Cambodian history have virtually ended...

...As in India, language and behavior were oriented toward differences in status...

...So-called "co-operative farms" (sakakar) were introduced in 1973...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MARK IRWIN FROG'S ADVICE TO A YOUNG GIRL IN LOVE Dressed in July's thick night air, she walks toward the pond's opera, mouth...

...No, they didn't...

...In some areas, the process of liberation went on for several years...

...and a stress on collective leadership, ownership and selfreliance...

...The transformation affects every aspect of Cambodian life...

...Others went underground, especially in the mountainous southwest...

...and the constitution condemns "so-called humanitarian" aid...

...Peasants have been "outside history" for many years...

...In the Cambodian case, in 1976, autarky makes sense, both in terms of recent experience --American intervention, and what is seen as the Western-induced corruption of previous regimes---and in terms of Cambodia's long history of conflict with Vietnam...

...and Lon Nol aircraft, Khmer Rouge soldiers, filled with what one of them called "uncontrolled hatred" took apart a pair of T-28 aircraft with their bare hands, and "would have eaten them, if possible," according to a witness...

...In the "old society" peasants placed a premium on individual freedom, and on leisure of an unsupervised kind...

...At the height of the Vietnam war, many intellectuals fled to remote parts of the kingdom including ones noted in the early 1950s for Viet Minh activitym to escape Sihanouk's police and to revolutionize their countrymen along Maoist lines...

...The youngest and poorest segments of society, it seems, responded enthusiastically to the revolution...

...Self-reliance also explains turning away from Cambodia's past to make a society where there are "no rich and no poor, no exploiters and no exploited," and where, in the words of the constitution, people are free to "have no religious beliefs...

...Can the regime recapture the grandeur of Angkor without duplicating the slavery (and by implication, the elite) that made Angkor what it was...

...Did families grow more or less cohesive...

...Cambodians who are happy with the revolution are inside Cambodia, bm there is no way of heating their opinions...

...Instead, by raising embankments and digging irrigation canals, the children of Cambodia build their own independence monuments, ones that they can see, and their children, t o o . . . The theme of self-reliance is stressed in Cambodia's constitution, promulgated in January of last year, and derives in part from the dissertation that one of Cambodia's leaders, Khieu Samphan, wrote in France in 1959...

...Cambodian records compiled before the arrival of the French in 1863 were written by and for the literate elite, and must reflect their scale of values...

...The word for "to govern" an area was the same as the word "to consume...

...There is no postal service...

...She watches and listens...

...We don't build monuments like that...

...At the same time, I might feel less cautious and more optimistic if I were able to hear the voices of people I knew in the Cambodian countryside fourteen years ago, telling me about the revolution in their own words...

...The regime--which calls itself Democratic Kampuchea, but is known to most of its people as angkar, "the organization'mhas moved millions of people out of towns and cities onto rural work-sites, in a process aimed at increasing agricultural production, fostering self-reliance, and destroying what it calls the "old society...

...In cultural and economic terms, the word has been attacked by T. S. Eliot, used by Stalin, and defended by Mussolini...

...the dialogue of young girls and princes...

...they saw only photos...

...Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s, a younger generation of Marxists, made' up for the most part of Cambodians trained abroad or by French Marxists teaching in Cambodia, came of age and challenged Sihanouk's "Buddhist Socialist" regime...

...Timidly she approaches and lowers one bare foot to the water's glassy surface...

...a. medley of bow strung rapture...

...The first months of peace in Battambang, for example, were harsh...

...Gambling, drinking, polygamy and extramarital sex, are frowned upon, or worse...

...What kind of independence was that...

...Many leaders of the regime have Marxist pasts, some going back to the 1940s, when several thousand Cambodians--especially among those living in southern Vietnam--cast their lot with the Communist-led Viet Minh...

...Other features of life in liberated zones included all-night political and cultural rallies, called miting, after the English word, in both Cambodian and Vietnamese...

...The work-teams were made up of groups of 10, 30, 100, 300 and 900 people, led at each level, except the lowest, by three workers placed in charge of "work" (the tasks at hand), "politics" (culture and morale) and "economics" (food and tools...

...The northeastern parts of the kingdom, already a base and corridor for Vietnamese liberation forces, were liberated by the Cambodians fairly early, probably with Vietnamese help...

...Cambodian officials told a Swedish diplomat early in 1976 that these included the entire Vietnamese population of Cambodiamperhaps 150,000 people-but unlike refugees in Thailand, .they are inaccessible to outsiders...

...bombing patterns, after 1969...

...Did old elites break down, persist, or reappear...

...The frequency of locallyled rebellions in the nineteenth century~against the Thai, the Vietnamese, the French and local officials-suggests that Cambodian peasants were not as peaceable as their own mythology, reinforced by the French, would lead us to believe...

...Political leadership has been collectivized, too, in contrast to the personalized rule of Prince Sihanouk (1941-1970) and the befuddled dictatorship of Field Marshal Lon Nol, whose Khmer Republic (1970-1975) was called (by Nixon) a "model of the Nixon Doctrine...

...Who saw the thing...

...Kissinger's "bargaining chips" and the violence of the civil war forced everyone in the kingdom to take sides...

...The population, officially a blend of "workers, peasants, and the revolutionary army," dresses in the black cotton pyjamas traditionally worn, at work, by poor Cambodian peasants...

...This development reduced Prince Sihanouk's freedom to maneuver, as head of an ostensibly pro-Chinese government-inexile, and allowed the Khmer Rouge to replace proSihanouk cadres with their own people as they accelerated their experiments, on Cambodian soil, with Maoist ideas of revolution...

...The country is no longer a kingdom, and Buddhism is no longer the state religion...

...Instead, everyone is at work, "happily" building dams, canals and embankments to provide water for two or even three rice crops a year--an achievement unequaled since the days of Angkor...

...In the capital...

...The ideology of Democratic Kampuchea draws its strength and wording from Marxism, especially as acted out in China, without formally acknowledging the debt...

...Is the price for liberation, in human terms, too high...

...By this time, the people o[ Battambang and Plmom Penh--perhaps two and a half million of them--had been moved into the countryside by the revolutionary army, organized into work-teams and ordered to produce their own food...

...What has taken their place...

...A morbid jingle declared that "Khmaer krohom somlap, rain del prap" ("the Khmer Rouge kill, but never explain...

...Collective self-reliance or autarky, as preached by the regime, contrasts sharply with what might be called the slave mentaiity that suffused pre-revolutionary Cambodia and made it so "peaceful" and "charming" to the elite and to most outsiders--for perhaps two thousand years...

...conversely, power, however ruthlessly applied, was taken as proof of meritorious behavior~ in another life...

...people who had called each other, in the past, "Sir", "Brother" and "Uncle"--to name only three Cambodian "pronouns"mmust now address each other as "friend...

...Transportation and property have been collectivized...

...In the late 1960s, these two strands of Cambodian radicalism--old Viet Minh and young intellectuals--merged...

...The French were not drawn to this kind of question, preferring to reconstruct Cambodia's ancient temples, nurture a small elite, and modernize the economy to provide surpluses of rice and rubber...

...This means that we know very little, in quantitative or political terms, about the mass of Cambodian society, many of whom, for most Of their history, appear t o have been slaves of one sort or another...

...Others were "re-educated," or killed...

...Shops, schools and monasteries are closed...

...After the Geneva Conference of 1954, when France withdrew from Indochina, an estimated 2,000 of these men and women chose to go to North Vietnam rather than live under Sihanouk or Ngo Dinh Diem...

...I put these questions to show how shaky our knowledge of Cambodian rural history often is...

...By 1971mafter Sihanouk had been toppled by a rightist coup--the Khmer Rouge occupied roughly two-thirds of Cambodia's territory, and controlled perhaps half its population...

...and the ideology of Cambodia's students, including those who went abroad...

...Leftists who stayed in Cambodia and formed a People's Party were ruthlessly suppressed by Sihanouk and his police...

...In 1973, after the Paris Agreements, Vietnamese influence over the Khmer Rouge diminished...

...Autarky is the keynote of Cambodia's ideology today, and certainly explains changing "Cambodia," in English ("Cambodge" in French) to "Kampuchea," reflecting local pronunciation, as if Argentina had changed the "g" in its name to an "h...

...What happened to rural attitudes towards authority and success...

...The big people's children went in and out of Cambodia, going here and there, and then they came back, to control our kind of people...

...Western medicines are not prescribed, and the Cambodian language has been overhauled to root out foreign words...

...What was wrong with the "old society," these broadcasts suggest, was exploitation (literally, in Cambodian, "riding and stomping") and outsiders...

...The speech went something like this: In the old days, the big people told us we had independence...

...Is ,the revolution a DAVID P. CHANDLER, presently on sabbatical from Monash Universi~ in Australia, is working on ~ general history of Cambodia at the East Asian Research Center at Harvard...

...To understand their picture of the world, we should remember that for, the first thousand years or so of the Christian era, Cambodians were heavily influenced by India, which gave them an alphabet, a court language, art-styles, two religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) and a fairly rigid, if often haphazard, sense of social hierarchies...

...Another problem with their testimony is that so many of them have escaped from northwestern Cambodia, where radical politics before liberation were weak, rural class differences especially pronounced, and agricultural production higher than elsewhere in the country...